What mode do you shoot in?

Roni's topic about still struggling got me thinking. ; What mode do you typically shoot in? ; All manual, aperature priority, shutter priority, or auto? ; I have been trying to stay out of the green box and shoot in aperature, what do you do?

 

Depends on what I'm doing. With the flash on I find myself using full manual. Chasing kids around and/or trying to keep the shutter at an acceptable speed while letting as much light in as possible I use shutter priority. If I'm primarily interested in DoF I use aperture priority; when I have the opportunity to really sit and consider everything I will also switch to full manual. It really depends on the situation.

 

Recently I've been shooting in full manual about 95% of the time since it gives me more control over the shot. ; If I'm not sure where to start with the settings I'll throw it into aperture priority and take a test shot and then throw it back into manual.

I use shutter priority the whenever I need to maintain a specific shutter speed in rapidly changing lighting conditions.

 

Hey! ; I got somebody else thinking?? ; Cool! ; Thanks, Tim.

Right now, I'm shooting in Aperture Priority mode mostly, trying to get the hang of how it all relates. ; I'm only just starting to understand the relationship between aperture and shutter speed and finally beginning to add 2+2. (so to speak). ; I've read it a million times, but it took weeks and weeks of practicing (mostly messing up) for it to finally start coming together in my head.

I did spend an evening with the book Understanding Exposure...and shot in full manual mode. ; That works for me at midnight when everyone is in bed and I have an hour to work on one shot. ; But if I'm just out taking photographs, it's totally ridiculous. ; I took about a hundred blurry photos of my boys playing basketball, just shaking my head and going.."what the heck am I doing wrong??" before I finally figured out that I had it in manual focus instead of auto focus and by then, the gorgeous light was gone. ; sigh.

Tom posted a gorgeous giraffe photo on flickr today and I studied the exif data for it and saw that he set the shutter speed himself. ; (at least I hope I read that correctly) That photo was so clear and clean looking. ; I just tried to get a squirrel photo the other day and had the aperture set at f14 but the shutter speed was too slow. ; So anyway...I'm starting to get the relationship. ; I just find it hard to understand how I'm ever gonna remember all of this when I'm actually trying to get a photograph!

Sometimes, I just get tired of thinking and throw it back to the little green box, I admit. ; But the photos often don't come out as good that way, unless the lighting conditions are perfect.

Thanks for getting me thinking again.

 

Roni,

Don't worry about how you're going to remember it, just keep practicing it and the memory will take care of itself.

 

I tend to shoot in aperture mode mostly. When shooting portraitures for clients controlling the DOF is important to me. Other times I'll shoot in shutter speed and rarely in manual.

 

I ; shoot in a painfully automatic mode until I get my SLR here in a couple weeks. I can't wait to be free of the point and shoot! ; ;D

 

Aperture priority for the most part; shutter priority when I need a certain shutter speed for sports or some other type of action shot.

 

I'm guilty of using the presets. 90% of the time it's in green box mode, 10% burst mode.

 

I learned photography from Understanding Exposure, and as a result, I shot full manual during 2008. ; In 2009 I switched it up and went with a roughly 55/35/10 mix between Aperture Priority, Manual, and Shutter Priority. ; Unlike the others, I use aperture priority on dark rides. ; I only really used shutter priority for that damn safari (I would NOT have gone to f/14 on that shot, for some reason it got really bright when I took it...the rest of the shots from that safari trip were around f/4 which is wide open on that lens), panning, and a few other things I can't remember now.

I often still use full manual at night because I have a fairly good idea where the exposure should be without the camera offering its input (although I still do see what the meter has to say).

 

Thanks for all of the feedback. ; Tim, I seem to recall reading a while back that you shoot a majority of the time in Aperature, and that is what I started aiming for. ; I occasionally shoot in Program mode when I'm feeling lazy and try to stay out of the green box always, unless I'm really lazy. ;

I need to put more thought into shooting action shots, like bball and soccer games, in shutter priority. ; Always something to work on. ; Like Roni, it seems like it will be hard to remember all of the formulas, but I guess it will come in time.

Again, thanks for the comments!!

 

I shoot mostly in Program AE (P mode on most SLRs). It works for me most of the time.

For dark rides, and fireworks, I shoot hand-held and use Shutter Speed Priority (Tv on Canon SLRs). I set the shutter speed to the slowest that I believe I can hold steady by hand (usually 1/15 sec) and let 'er rip. For fireworks, I typically pre-focus on the castle before the lights go down, then switch to manual focus, because the camera can't focus on black sky with streaks of light. I hit about .100 with these techniques.

I also use Tv mode for fast action capture, such as street performers and daylight parades, and of course for many fountain shots where I want to either freeze the water mid-air, or turn it silky with a longer exposure. Shooting the waterfalls in Epcot's Canada pavilion way back with my Canon Rebel G 35mm in about 1999 or 2000 was my first experience with Tv, and my first foray out of P mode, and it has served me well over the years.

Once in a while I switch to Auto Depth of Field mode (A-DEP on Canon SLRs). A-DEP uses all the focus points (if you choose a particular patter, the camera ignores that in A-DEP mode), and adjusts the aperture to give maximum DOF so that everything in the frame is in focus. It's not perfect, but in some situations where I have close foreground and far background, it has worked better than P mode. Eventually, I hope to have good enough instincts about aperture selection to set it manually, but for now, A-DEP makes a nice crutch.

I almost never use Aperture Priority mode (Av on Canon SLRs). And now that I think of it, that's a huge mistake, because using Tv mode has given me a much greater instinctive understanding of shutter speed, and since aperture is the mighty dragon I have yet to confront, maybe I need to start using Av more often.

Those "Creative Zone" modes on my Digital Rebel (Landscape, Portrait, Action, etc)? Never met 'em, never want to. They're nothing but green box modes with settings optimized for those situations, and using them gives me no greater understanding or feel for how the camera operates than the dreaded Green Monster.

 

I shoot aperture priority 99% of the time. ; Honestly.. I think the only times I don't shoot in it are either if I'm doing a night shot where I need an exposure longer than the maximum exposure option for auto exposure or if I'm using a flash and want the camera to use the flash to properly exposure the subject. ; I caught a discussion here that made it seem like Nikon cameras have more elaborate flash modes, but for me either I use Av and the camera exposes for the background and uses the flash to fill in the subject or else I use manual and the flash tries to fill in the subject within the constraints of whatever exposure settings I'm using.

Or one other rarity. ; If I'm shooting something like a panorama and want to stay with an identical exposure for every shot but expect that the meter will be seeing differing lighting conditions as I move the camera.

I can tell you why this is too. ; My first SLR was this neat little Pentax I got at a garage sale, I believe it was an ME Super. ; It was, for the time, the most advanced camera I'd ever used. ; It had auto exposure where it could automatically choose the appropriate shutter speed for the aperture you had selected. ; It was still manual focus, but the auto exposure was still a novelty for me.

So that's how I learned to shoot. ; Generally even in situations where exposure time is important I still leave it in Av but set the aperture and ISO to try to get an exposure time that I like. ; It's just how I think. ; I could get similar results in P, perhaps, but I prefer the aperture setting being static and never changing unless I change it. ; P would adjust both of them together, I think.

A good enough auto ISO system could change my approach, but the limited implementation that my camera has tends to leave me with a shutter speed lower than I'd prefer when I'm shooting long telephoto shots. ; So I just stopped using it altogether.

 

Yep, aperture priority for me 95% of the time. The other 5% would be manual for long-exposure night shots.

 

i'm trying to make it sop to return to baseline after any shooting, nothing more embarrassing than picking up the camera, firing away at some stunning landscape, only to find you are still in last nights low light iso3200 and it's all blown out. baseline for me

1. aperture priority
2. iso 100
3. auto white balance
4. center weighted metering
5. f8 and be there

if i always start out the day there, then i know it, and i can quickly find my way to some other settings, and easy to return to baseline